iTunes Bad, WMA Good

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I just spent the last couple of weeks trying to get my digital audio collection in order. It’s no small task, mind you. I had MP3s and WMAs and who knows what else scattered all over my hard drive, with various schemes for filenames, some missing ID3 tag data, and many files at bitrates that I find, for lack of a better word, unmusical. I’m in pretty good shape now, with a single global Music folder on my separate media hard disk. It’s organized by album, with file names that are consistent across my collection. Almost everything is re-ripped at a nice high bitrate that stands up to a well-trained ear and quality audio equipment.

Over the weekend, I read several mainstream articles about the iPod and iTunes (as well as several other digital music stores and players), including a well-written but somewhat disagreeable piece in the local San Francisco Bay Guardian. After immersing myself in audio codecs (as research for a future article) and re-ripping most of my own collection, I’ve come to the conclusion that I really like WMA — and I really don’t like the whole iTunes/iPod thing.

The other week, when we ran a bunch of Linux articles and reviews, we were accused by some in the forums of ignoring Windows and Microsoft. The implication was that we were becoming open-source zealots. Well, guys, here’s your comeuppance. Here’s where I praise a Microsoft solution, slam the open stuff, and dis Apple, all at the same time. Oh, the mail I’m going to get.

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